The Game

‘Alice in Wonderland’ meets ‘Night of the Living Dead’

Cult Of The Abyss is a cute-horror-survival-sandbox that lands you in a broken world ruled by a dark apocalyptic cult. A whimsical journey takes place in which you play the character of a boy called “Chris” and his best friend “Quest” – a dog. You both need to search for loot, explore and survive. You build your own hideouts, protect and defend them to not get overrun by the eerie creatures that hunt you at nighttime. The game offers searching loot, crafting, base building,magic , farming, taking care of your dog and most importantly surviving together!

The whole project is a one-man development. #solodev

Gameplay Mechanics v.003

*Note: Ideas might change through development

Open World / Sandbox

Explore a vast, procedurally generated, endless terrain with different biomes and a spooky world underneath. Decide where to build and what to do – be creative!

You can change the entire environment by dismantling, destroying, digging, building and repairing.

It’s all up to you!

Day/Night Cycle

Be cautious about the time of day: at night the Cult’s mutants form hordes and appear out of the subways and dungeons. They search for food and pray at the totems.

Underground

Find an eerie world below the magical world. Roam through dark subway stations and tunnel systems. Maybe build an outpost there? Find loot in the boney catacombs and explore. But beware the creepy creatures that live here!

General survival system for each character

Over time, every character will develop different needs. States like hunger, thirst, stress, headaches, bleeding, exhaustion, the need to take a dump, intoxication and more.

based on these needs and the current environment, every character gets into situations like “I’m hungry”, “enemy in range”, “companion in fight” or “blocked path” and others.

Characters are able to make plans on how to solve the situation and trying to execute them.

relationships between characters form (can make friends and enemies) #futureidea

Specific behaviours for character types

mutants search for totems they can pray to so they can elevate their mood

at nighttime mutants seek to come up from the underground to seek for food, during the day they want to go back down

at “witching hour” mutants will know exactly where you are and hunt you down

there are fairies looking for friendly/neutral characters to heal them

as a player you can get the stat “missing quest” which will drain your mood.

cultists should form hords at dark messes #futureidea

World/environment systems

standing too long next to a totem will drain your mood and spawn a cultist #futureidea

poisoning plants growing over tiles #futureidea

growing slime #futureidea

hordes

Companion and Character Interaction

Keep an eye out for your companion. He is depending on you and you need to take care of him.

At the moment the interaction with NPCs includes feeding, cuddling, you can shoo and call them.

I am planning to add more Tamagotchi-like interactions especially for relationship between player and companion „Quest“.

Crafting / Produce

Harvest, chuck, pick and loot the items you need to craft things with and which are necessary for your survival. Build certain “furniture” like workbench or fireplace to unlock more specific recipes.

Base Building

Craft or find different types of blocks and objects to build a hideout for you and your companion to make it through the night. Protect your base with spikes, magical plants and other tower defense mechanisms. Settle and rebuild a broken house in the city area.

Loot Items

Find all kinds of items in different places like shelves, cupboards, cars, dead bodies and more. You should also look for magic weapons and items to cast spells.

Biomes & Plants & Farming

Seed and harvest plants to eat and grow. Plants grow over time at different speeds on different biomes.

Tower Defence

You can build “thaumatech”-towers to protect your base as well as spikes and traps.

Thaumaturgy is the special source of magical-energy in the world of Cult of the Abyss and thaumatech is the technology that can use it. For the future I want to add magical plants that help you to protect your base and survive attacks of big hordes..

Game Over

You need to find a way back home and once you do find your way out you solved the game.

If your character dies you can decide if you want to respawn. If you do so you must find your belonging and your companion quest.

If you are without your companion for too long your mood-level shrinks and you might fall into depression.

If you or your companion dies there is also a resurrection spell to recall him.

Future Ideas

I have a ton of ideas I would like to try and implement.

I’m thinking about friendly intelligent NPCs you can interact with. There is the story about the Loomies which are the inhabitants of the world but killed by the dark cult. I’m planning to create Loomy survivor characters you can encounter.

Also, I’m still playing with the idea of having imaginary friends that appear and help you i.e. building your base or chucking trees and defending.

On top of that I want to work on the city and underground-dungeon generation.

I’d like to add water-life and the possibility to go fishing.

Enforcing the cult aspect in the world by having specific cultists biomes and bases/dungeons would be great to add as well.

And of course there are so many more enemy characters I’d like to add, more items, more biomes and environment stuff… endless possibilities.

Abschnitt 2

The Dev

Who I am

Hi, my name is Chris! I am a Berlin based freelance artist and solo indie developer.

I worked around 5 years in the Entertainment/Games Industry as a Concept Artist when I finally decided to take up the challenge to develop my own game.

www.christophkaplan.de

Why I do this

I never called myself a gamer but computer games have definitely been a big part of my life. It all started with Dune 2 from Westwood, anything from Nintendo console to Age of Empires, Duke3D and StarCraft. I remember spending entire nights at LAN parties using null modem cable trying to make it work. Today I like to play games like Rimworld, 7 Day to Die and Hearthstone. All of these games carry a certain experimental and sandbox angle. Creating something has lead me to all kinds of different areas. At the age of 16 I started learning basic coding at an IT school and continued to study graphic design at uni. I made electronic/hip hop music and for many years I used to be a graffiti writer as well.

While working in the industry as a Concept Artist, I played around with Unity3d and I understood that I could combine all learnings from the past to make my own game.

I was hooked on the idea to make a game that I would play myself and i could define every aspect.

What kind of Game? Gameplay/World

When I was little I remember wondering why nobody made a game where you could “do anything you want”. Later open-world sandbox type games appeared and this seemed to simply be that type. I wanted to develop something close to genres that inspired me but adding my own twist. Since I had a lot of fun with survival games I picked this type as a base idea. When thinking of the type of game it leads me to the question about how to shape the setting of the world. Most survival games have a classical zombie setting in a contemporary world and military aspects. But I knew vaguely that my game had to be a whimsical, magical – and in parts – even bizarre world with a bit of humor. I like dark phantastic worlds and “new weird” fiction, a Lovecraftian universe influences me as well and I thought that I’ll try to mix things up, use ideas of zombie-world and combine it with magical and dreamy aspects. An overall anachronistic composition gives me the freedom to not get stuck with rational patterns too much and helped me to create the world of “Cult of the Abyss”.